Walking up a DC street, away from the White House
and a giant crowd at a peace rally. Kristin Matherly says, "Um,
what's the other one? Saddam is a piece of poo, but Dubya so
are you."

viviparous (vye-vipp'-er-us)
adj. 1: bearing or bringing forth live young (as most
mammals and some other animals) instead of laying eggs, as opposed
to oviparous 2: in botany, germinating while still on the plant,
as certain seeds or bulbs 3: producing such seeds or bulbs; proliferous.

"Truly, this game is addictive. And I can't think of
a better game for getting children to develop divergent thinking
skills. No family (or classroom) should be without this game." -- the description of Fluxx that appears in the Chinaberry
mail order catalog

On
Saturday, we joined a pre-emptive protest of a pre-emptive war.
It was an inspiring and exhausting event, and I could easily
spend quite a bit of time here describing both the march and
the issues. However, I'm going to defer to my fellow toasters
for that. For a better description of the march, see the GinohnNews,
and for more information about the peace movement, check out
toK's new Peace
pages. Since Bush seems bent of attacking Iraq and this issue
won't be going away any time soon, toK has offered to start providing
us with a weekly link to a peace-related website worthy of our
attention.

Last week I described the signs
we decided at the last minute to create, and they worked out
really well! We wished we'd had a whole lot more of them. But
since this war isn't likely to just go away, we're figuring there'll
be a lot more marches in our future and we should probably go
ahead and make a real run of these signs.

Our signs stood out nicely in the sea of signs that swirled
around us... we gave about half of our supply away to random
enthusiastic strangers we encountered, and it was fun seeing
them later in the midst of a wall of humanity. In fact, our signs
were so recognizable that you can see one in the photo that appeared
on the front page of Sunday's Washington Post! Check it out:

Speaking of being opposed to wars, on Tuesday some of us will
get the chance to express our opinions about the war on drugs,
and I urge anyone living in a state with a marijuana ballot initiative
to consider instead the way of peace. In addition to my own writings on the subject,
I recommend you surf over to Marlene's
page for her thoughts on Nevada's Question
9. (You should also read the big articles on marijuana prohibition
in the current issues of Time and Maxim magazines.)

Anyway,
here's hoping you've been having a great Halloween. We have.
On Tuesday, we carved pumpkins,
and here's a photo of the three of us in the costumes we made
this year: we're the crew of the Starship Wunderland! As long
as we were making these shirts, we made an extra for the crewman
who'll die ten minutes into the episode. Currently, Stoney
is bravely volunteering to be our red-shirt. (Would anyone else
like this role? We're thinking about making these red shirts
available in the Dangling Carrot...)

Don't Forget to Vote!

I was delighted to see, by studying the most
recent on-board DC subway map, that 3 new stations are actively
being developed: one on the Red Line between Union Station and
Rhode Island Ave. and two at the Maryland end of the Blue Line.
I wonder if they'll ever make the additions I'd like to see (besides
a purple line along the beltway), namely extending the Orange
Line to Dulles airport, and our Green Line to BWI airport (via
Beltsville, Laurel, and Columbia). (And I remain bitter about
the fact that the Yellow Line doesn't extend all the way to Greenbelt
as originally planned.)

"I don't know about you, but I find it profoundly
disturbing that in a nominally free country this can't even come
up for debate. If we taxed the estimated $32 billion crop (America's
largest) instead of fruitlessly trying to eradicate it, we'd
instantly raise billions for the war effort... and instantly
free up thousands of well-trained cops and federal agents to
help avert the next deadly attack. If another mad bomber slips
through the net because the extra manpower we need is off busting
some dude for smoking a joint after work, isn't that beyond obscene?" -- Keith Blanchard, Editor-in-chief of Maxim magazine,
in the Editor's Letter of the October 2002 issue

America now has more black men in jail than in
college.(791,600 vs. 603,032 as of the year 2000. (Source:
Justice Policy Institute.)]